As mentioned above, I'm in a reading phase - getting through lots of books. In the last year or so I've read the following:

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale: I bought it as I liked the synopsis on the back, but overall was slightly disappointed with it.

Muriel Barbery - The Elegance of the Hedgehog:At times uplifting, equally frustrating if you know bugger all about "art" (like me) and ultimately very sad. Overall I enjoyed it.

Dickie Bird - My Autobiography:I'm not really into cricket, but I always found him amusing when on TV. Bits of it were funny, but he had a habit of over-explaining things. For example (and I'm making this up, but you'll get the gist) "I never liked it when bowlers sent down three bouncers in an over. That is to say, if they sent down more than two bouncers, I got right cross with them..." etc. Overall a very easy read, but just ok at best.

Justin Cronin - The Passage:WOW! I'm into vampires (proper ones, not that noncey Twilight shite) and this book is brilliant for that. As mentioned above, a beast of a book, but the very last paragraph...WOW! Can't wait to read The Twelve when it's down to manageable paperback size rather than needing its own post code.

Nelson Demille - various:a) Gold Coast - I LOVED this book, made me totally laugh out loud, as the lead character (John Sutter) is soooo me! An excellent, easy to read, exciting thriller with genuine belly laughs;b) The Gatehouse - the follow-up to Gold Coast. Same lead character, not as good as GC, but still very enjoyable;c) Nightfall - after reading the two above I bought most of his other books. This one was OK but nothing special. A John Corey book, who is another great lead character.d) Plum Island - I'm halfway through this now - it's the one which introduces John Corey, and I'm enjoying it / laughing almost as much as GC.

Brendan DuBois - Resurrection Day:An interesting premise (the Cuban Missile Crisis ended up in a limited nuclear war) and set in the early 70s. I'd chased it down, as I'm totally fascinated by nuclear war, especially fiction, but overall this felt a bit dated and was ultimately a little disappointing.

A.B.Facey - A Fortunate Life:An Aussie classic autobiography by a guy born into a very poor family in the late 19th Century, how he moved across Australia to live in the harsh west, what he got up to on the way, fought in WW1 (including at Gallipoli I think). Amazing what he experienced, although pissed me off slightly towards the end when he took up the boringly predictable "didn't really like those English" stance at times.

Frederick Forsyth - The Day of the Jackal:Obviously a classic - easy to see why, easy to read, charming bad guy and a good ending. I liked it.

John Lewis Gaddis - The Cold War:Non-fiction, goes into a few things that were really interesting about the whole period of the 1950s through to the 1990s.

David Graham - Down To A Sunless Sea:Another one in my nuclear war fiction list that I managed to track down (bloody hard to get, mind you). A potentially great scenario - a Boeing747 full of people, mid Atlantic when nuclear war breaks out, and they have nowhere to land - but let down by the macho writing style; I could imagine Humphrey Bogart saying half the lines through gritted teeth as the pilot talks about his "broads" on the plane. But still, a great idea and a pretty good ending too.

Deborah Harkness - A Discovery of Witches:Her vampires (and daemons) are a bit Anne Rice-esque (I'm a fan of some Anne Rice stuff, especially the earlier Vampire chronicles), and although a bit slow in places I enjoyed it, and looking forward to the second book.

Robert Harris - Lustrum:A novel about statesman/great orator Cicero in the height of the Roman empire - really enjoyed it. At times brutal.

John Irving - Until I Find You:Not the sort of thing I'd normally read, but I bought it based on the interesting synopsis on the back. GREAT move - one of the best books I've ever read. Very long, but never, ever dull, and a fantastic uplifting ending. It's about a boy, abandoned by his church-organ-playing father, brought up by his mother who becomes a tattoo artist to make ends meet, and uses that profession to move around Europe searching for the boy's father. The boy grows up to be a Hollywood film star, but he carries through on the obsession to find his father. I was almost in tears at the end - a totally fabulous book.

Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go:Again, not normally my sort of thing but the summary looked good. Made into a film now with Keira Knightly. I thought it was a good idea, but was frustratingly slow at times, and never really got at all to the heart of why these children were being farmed for organs at a stately home in the south of England - no background to it at all, and I wanted much more of an explanation at the end.

Stephen King - various:a) Under the Dome - mentioned above when I was halfway through. As I said above, nowhere near as good as The Stand, although was heralded as it's natural successor by some critics, but no way. Good at times, but disappointing by the end.b) Cell - an easy schlock horror read, about a virus passed by mobile phones. Started with a bang, and didn't let up. Quite enjoyable if you're a SK fan (which I am.)

Steig Larsson - the Millennium Trilogy (all 3 of them):Another WOW!!! from me - all 3 books, TOTALLY brilliant. I only bought The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo because it was $5 in a sale - it just previously didn't appeal. Within 50 pages I'd bought the next two to read. Lisbeth Salander is a totally brilliant anti-heroine, and all 3 books are superb. I'll read them again sometime.

John Ajvide Lindqvist - Let The Right One In:Fabulous book about a vampire. Truly creepy in parts - loved it! The Swedish film adaptation is pretty good, too.

Robert R. McCammon - Swan Song:Another post apocalyptic thriller (not nukes this time) and a much bigger book than his normal stock-horror books which I enjoyed (especially Baal and They Thirst). It's his The Stand, if you know what I mean. I really thought it was good.

Ron Rosenbaum - How The End Begins:Non-fiction, centred around potential nuclear war scenarios (hence I bought it) and then going into his theories of disarmament, and a few true stories about how close the world came to nuclear disaster on a few occasions (not just Cuba.) Started off as a great read, but then in the second half ended up as a bit of a diatribe on how Israel had every right to defend itself against whatever, as they have been persecuted forever, particularly dwelling on the holocaust. An interesting subject, but I'd have preferred a more balanced view.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned:A "classic" which I found a bit depressing, the way a few young people in "high society" in the early 20th Century in the US lived it up, then fell down the ladder with the Depression. Quite enjoyed it, though.

Margaret Thatcher - The Downing Street YearsI grew up in the period in which MT was PM - I was 12 when she came to power in 1979, so it was facinating to read her view on many of the things which were going on. The only two bits I got bored with (and it's a bloody long book) were to do with housing, and Nigel Lawson's machinations over wanting the pound to shadow the German Deutschmark. The rest of it I found fascinating. The film with Meryl Streep was a bloody good adaptation of this book, with only one tiny exception (around the sinking of the General Belgrano during the Falklands War, where the film introduced some poetic license to add more drama - in fact the reality was drama enough, without portraying MT banging her fist on the table and saying "Sink it!")

Markus Zusak - The Book Thief:A magnificent novel about a girl growing up in Nazi Germany at the start of WW2. Narrated by Death, it's genuinely moving, right to the end. I'll definitely read it again.

Still to read in my list (books are bought, just in the queue):

Several Tom Clancy books (I've read up to and including The Cardinal Of The Kremlin)

Books 5 onwards of Stephen King's Dark Tower series: for the life of me, I just couldn't get on with them, found all of them hard work, but I'll persevere. Also Lisey's Story.

Several Nelson Demille books

John Birmingham - Without Warning

Charles Dickens - David Copperfield and Great Expectations

Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo

Allan Folsom - The Hadrian Memorandum (I've really enjoyed all his others, especially The Day After Tomorrow, and Day of Confession)

Robin Fox - The Classical World (all about Roman and Greek mythology)

Stanley Gallon - Darkest Days (similar to Resurrection Day above)

David Hill - Gold (non-fiction about gold being mined in Australia)

Stuart Macintyre - A Concise History of Australia

Nelson mandela - Long Walk To Freedom

Deborah Moggach - The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Erin Morgenstern - The Night Circus

John Mulvaney - Prehistory of Australia (I'm interested by the early Aboriginals, their tales, the geology of Aus, etc etc, and this is a beast of a book about all that sort of thing.)

Simon Schama - A History of Britain Volumes 1 and 2 (up to 1776. I won't buy Vol3 until I've read the first 2)

Mark Twain - Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

Jules Verne - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea

So there you go, a bit of a mixture. Anyone still awake? Sorry about that!...

Well who's that shouting? John, ex-Moderator - all he ever gives us is pain!

You've got stamina JJ. It takes me ages to read a book these days. I'm reading Metz 1944 by Anthony Kemp at the moment. It's about how the Germans managed to hold up Patton's 3rd Army for three months, using 19th century fortifications, (they were pretty much bomb and bullet proof). This enabled Hitler to fight the Battle of the Bulge.

A surprise find yesterday afternoon in the Oxfam bookshop stockroom. A prestine 'as new' copy of John Taylor's 2012 'In The Pleasure Grove - Love, Death & Duran Duran' which as well as being a fairly weighty tomb running to over 400 pages will I'm sure be a fascinating and enjoyable read!

Lots of Michael Moorcock, and I am re-reading 'Real Life's A Bugger - A Tale of Sex Dragons & Rock N Roll' which was written by a Sheffield based author and is a 'coming of age commentary' set in the 80s.

In terms of Moorcock, I'm working through the Oswald Bastable trilogy.

Reading Simon Reynolds revamped Energy Flash at the moment, it's all about the late 80s early nineties dance/rave scene. Rave rather passed me by, I was into rallying at the time. I was vaguely aware of it without being a part, I remember seeing conveys of cars at night with flashing headlamps coming down the M4 and heading off into the wilds of Wiltshire and Hampshire. Sometimes they would stop in one of the services and the place would be swamped with manic young people buying bottles of water.

Nowerdays I don’t really have the focus, concentration or in some cases time to fully focus on reading but there is one book that really caught my interest throughout. I speak of ‘Ska’d For Life – A Personal Journey With The Specials’ written by the group’s bass player Horace Panter (PAN 2007, ISBN : 978-0-330-44073-8) which I came across recently in the Oxfam stockroom. At 300 pages featuring two black and photo sections, each containing eight pages I found it a very enjoyable, interesting read with what for me were surprising revelations and a few amusing anecdotes, a few of which I’d like to talk about. It’s a bit long but stick with me there are some good bits in this book that are definitely worthy of mentioning…

Back in August 1979 he talks about ‘blagging a ferry ride from the continent back to England with The Pretenders’ and on page 94 says that ‘James Honeyman-Scott and Martin Chambers were two of the funniest people I have ever met and they had me stitches all the way to and on the ferry. Horace also mentions on page 100 that ‘for about eight hours in 1982 he was actually part of The Pretenders’.

There is talk of a ‘2 Tone tour’ in 1979 with Madness leaving part way through around mid November to go and play in America. They are replaced by Dexys Midnight Runners of which, on page 117 he says that ‘the vibe on the [tour] coach changed. Dexy’s were very much ‘the men with a mission’. They kept themselves very definitely to themselves, all sat together at the front of the coach and all shared the one hotel (I think there were nine of them)’. Related to this on page 118 Horace talks about playing an ‘other Birmingham cassette’ which has a (pre-Saxa) version of ‘Mirror in the Bathroom which ‘had us Specials definitely rocking’. Whenever we played The Beat tape, Dexy’s, who occupied the front seats of the coach, would jeer, boo and hiss. Apparently there’d been a full-scale ruck between some members of the two bands at a party in Birmingham some time earlier in the year, and feelings between the two bands were not good. Sometimes we used to put the tape on just to wind up the young soul rebels, and it generally worked.

An interesting insight into life on a tour with other bands and there is more of that in other parts of the book. Tour anecdotes also feature during pages 136-173 (diary entries for America tour) and pages 211-232 (diary entries for Japan tour). However the ‘all time low’ moment on the road is conveyed during pages 248-250 in Cambridge during the 1980 ‘More Specials’ album tour. This resulted in court fines as detailed on page 256.

I am pleased that my assumption of a ‘common good-cause vibe’ between The Specials and The Beat was supported by Horace on page 256 when he relates an interesting perhaps hitherto unnoticed fact about the Christmas ‘Top of the Pops’ appearance. He says that ‘Beat bass player David Steele and I decided to swap roles. I would get to mime The Beat’s new single ‘Too Nice To Talk To’ and David would get to do his funky shuffling on ‘Do Nothing’. This ultimately led to post band project General Public in 1983.

There are frequent late book mentions to the ‘2 Tone live’ movie Dance Craze which brought a smile to my face, particularly on page 261. Horace says it’s owned by Stiff Records and he feels sure he’s seen a copy of it on DVD somewhere. I seriously doubt this… well not an official release anyway!

Aside from his saying that there were ‘lots of small things that caused The Specials to fall apart’ (page 208/209) I liked the opinion and insight into the making of iconic classic final single ‘Ghost Town’ on pages 267 & 268… but was there really a 12” version of this??? I loved hearing about shooting the video and page 275 he says ‘Now that was cool. I got to drive the black 1962 Vauxhall Cresta. Three-speed column-shift gear stick. Yeah, man. Filming started at around midnight and carried on until about 7 the next morning. We drove the car back and forth through the Blackwall Tunnel, through some deserted East End derelict slums and finally through the City, the financial district, deserted at five in the morning. During one of the runs through the tunnel, the camera, which was fixed to the bonnet by means of a gigantic rubber sucker, came loose and fell onto the bonnet of the car. They kept it in the video, but the guy who owned the Vauxhall was less than happy with the scratch on his paintwork. He’d been plied with cans of lager since shooting started and was somehow placated. It might have been money that usually worked.

I love their music, have a BBC Sessions CD and the 30th anniversary DVD but it is certainly great to get a further insight into such a memorable pop group as this.

It's an interesting read, Sarah - I borrowed it from someone a few years ago. Crystal Palace ex-chairman Simon Jordan played a big part in their being reunited and touring again in 2008, although from memory Jerry Dammers refused.

Well who's that shouting? John, ex-Moderator - all he ever gives us is pain!

I've read all her Vampire books - the first three (Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat and Queen of the Damned) were all excellent. This one has been a bit difficult to get through. Now I'm near the end it's picking up, but for the middle 3/5ths of the book it's been hard work.

Before that I read Charm School by Nelson Demille. I have liked every book of his I've read, and this was no exception.

I've just added some more shelves to my study so been going gang-busters on book-buying. So many to read, so little time...

Well who's that shouting? John, ex-Moderator - all he ever gives us is pain!

She's recounting her childhood memories of her family holidays in Wales back in the early 70s. I think it was a 3 part TV show on BBC last year but I didn't see it myself. It's entertaining and a quick read on the train to work each morning. Not a Classic by any means but good fun.

She's recounting her childhood memories of her family holidays in Wales back in the early 70s. I think it was a 3 part TV show on BBC last year but I didn't see it myself. It's entertaining and a quick read on the train to work each morning. Not a Classic by any means but good fun.

I love that books, it's one of the funniest things I've read, but I'm a great fan of Emma Kennedy's work.

I've just finished Electric Shock From The Gramophone To The iPhone 125 Years Of Popular Music by Peter Doggett. It's a fascinating book (though I drifted off a bit in the later chapters about East Coast vs West Coast rap) and Doggett weaves the story very well. There a numerous mentions of the Human League and the early 80s MTV-inspired 'invasion' of the US pop charts by British acts. It's a shame that with all music books there are niggly errors (crediting the 1981 version of Tainted Love to Marc Almond rather than Soft Cell) but it's a good read.

Since getting my kindle at Christmas, I'm getting through so many books (mostly just thriller or girlie stuff to get me through my commute). Anyway, I downloaded Divergent recently (it was in a 'free download' offer I received) and I've just finished it. I haven't been glued to a book like that for years!!! Loved it but wish I'd bought the real thing now. There's another 3 in the series I'll need to download now too and get the dvds!!

cs15 wrote:Currently reading: The Girl On The Train. So far I can't see what all the fuss is about. It's done huge business but with 150 pages in I'm really struggling with it. Hope it gets better soon.

I wouldn't bother ED. I'm finding it very dull. It's about an alcoholic woman who's obsessed with with her ex husband and his new wife. She has this sort of fantasty life and thinks she has witnessed some crime.